- my DAP (M3L) gives me two alternatives: mp3 and vorbis- I can't ABX vorbis at -q4 mostly (except killer samples), but easily ABX lame at -V4, even -V3 (classical and acoustic jazz music), so it's saving space a lot.- M3 displays vorbis tags without limitations (not mp3 tags)- yes, battery life is shorter, but M3L should play 35 hours with 128 kb mp3, so say 20 hours with vorbis isn't that bad.- maybe I'm still newb in this, but observe progress in vorbis development is still adventure for me and I like it.

Still MP3. Guaranteed support everywhere, transparent to me at APS. I don't trust vorbis except for narrowband. I may be persuaded to try MPC if it gets more widespread hardware-support - but even when being optimistic this would take at least 3 years. So i will stick to MP3 for quite a while.

Since lossless is growing and slowly getting hardware-support, i'd say that the most probable thing to happen is that i will stay with mp3 for 2-3 more years, and then directly switch to lossless.

I voted Vorbis even if recently i came back to Lame for my latests encoding (due to my iHP batery decreasing life)Anyway i wish to use MPC in quite near futur thanks to Rockbox... Even if it will mean reripp most of my AudioCDs... :/

I've used LAME since I started frequenting HA, but a lot of my MP3s were encoded using Radium @ 128kbps. My hearing isn't fantastic, so I don't have any problems with ~128kpbs.

I am quite tempted to switch to OGG or AAC, but I have an MP3 CD player in the car, which is where I get to listen to most of my music. Until I listen to most of my music on something that will play OGG or AAC I don't see the point in a switch.

I now have all my CDs in APE format, so the idea is that I will, sometime soon, get a 250GB external hardrive on which to store them. This will then provide the facility to very easily transcode everything to a lossy format of my choice.

I expect the first run will still be to LAME ~128kbps though. It will be nice to be shot of some of those early mistakes, like Xing and BladeEnc.

My CD deck indirectly supports Ogg, just plug the YP-MT6 into aux input. I do foresee official AAC support coming to car audio sooner than Ogg tho...

I've used Ogg Vorbis and MPC a lot in the past, but ATM I stick with MP3. Compatible with everything, and good enough for me.

Same thing for me. MPC was my lossy codec of choice, but now I'm using lossless for listening/archiving on my PC, and mp3 for my portable player. That's why I'm currently so interested by LAME development (3.97alphas).

I voted AAC, even though my entire audio collection is in FLAC Matroska. I was about to vote "other" until I remembered that I encode all my video's audio with HE-AAC. It seems to do quite well with voices, even if it's nowhere near the quality I expect from my music collection.

I'm not really worried about compatability because the videos are designed to play back on my computer and my computer only. If I was worried about compatability, I wouldn't encode to VFR anamorphic Matroska files either (Yes, I am a Matroska lackey... sue me.)

Meh, did you really expect the people to know how to use a search button?

I shouldn't, or so it seems.

QUOTE (rjamorim @ Feb 25 2005, 20:11 UTC)

He didn't even provide enough options in his poll.

Well, that remains to be seen. If you take a look at how few supporters Atrac, MP3pro, RealAudio and the likes have amongst HA members in the August 2004 poll, then I'd say the limited choice of AAC/MP3/MPC/Vorbis/WMA only is not entirely unjustifiable, be it for the sake of overview. There's still that other radio button to tick too, if you want or must.

Well, that remains to be seen. If you take a look at how few supporters Atrac, MP3pro, RealAudio and the likes have amongst HA members in the August 2004 poll, then I'd say the limited choice of AAC/MP3/MPC/Vorbis/WMA only is not entirely unjustifiable, be it for the sake of overview. There's still that other radio button to tick too, if you want or must.

Well, he should at least have provided an option "I don't use lossy, I prefer lossless"

--------------------

Get up-to-date binaries of Lame, AAC, Vorbis and much more at RareWares:http://www.rarewares.org

It's quite interesting to read about the number of people who have returned to MP3.

Obviously portables have a large part to play in this, however kudos must also go to Gabriel/the LAME team, who seem to have injectected a little more faith in LAME recently. People would be less inclined to return if LAME wasn't still a serious contender.

I don't pretend to understand the full story, but it seems that only recently has any development been taken seriously in favour of Dibrom's 3.90.3.

I personally use 3.96.1 (-V 5 --athaa-sensitivity 1) in an attempt to support the continuing development, and in the belief that it is at least equal to 3.90.3. I'm looking forward to future stable releases also (3.97a seems very promising).

I switched over with iTunes 4.7 since I can finally trust the quality with that. The main reasons is that it's transparent to my golden ears (although I have pretty good ear-hygiene), it encodes at over 26X, mass tagging is faaast, and all my gear is compatible.

This is just a comment of an "amateur" who isn't so much into the technical intricacies of the various codecs (I just struggle to understand something) and my experience is mainly limited to MP3 and various lossless codecs. This is just because I've started archiving music when MP3 (and WHAT MP3!!! ) was the only option, I'm a bit lazy and I'm quite stuck with my procedures, tools and legacy of archived music. Only since about a year I've decided that it is wise for me to keep at least a lossless copy of my music. Beside this safety procedure, I find LAME MP3 at -aps and neighbours totally transparent for me and thus more than enough quality wise and an insurance in terms of compatibility with current and future hardware and software.

All this given, and assuming similar if not identical qualities between the other codecs (haven't always been said that ABX tests at high quality levels are extremely difficult because of the transparent nature of all codecs?), I'm quite surprised by the results of the poll, so far. What I see is that MP3 still occupy the first position, and this is what I expectd, but I expected that the second an third position would be a tie between AAC because of the widespread support by the iPod and his aura of recognition as a "standard" and OggVorbis for its very much apreciated "free nature".

I was badly wrong: the very second encoder (and almost in a tie with MP3) is by far MPC, which I don't use and don't directly know, but of what I've heard only positive comments from the quality point of view. It is my understanding, anyway, that it is the least (if any at all) hardware supported codec and one for which developement and support only recently resurrected. I thought those factors would had a more important negative impact in its popularity and thought that the "iPod and iTunes factors" would have a more positive impact on AAC.

I'm honestly surprised to find that so many people still use MP3. I switched to Ogg Vorbis months ago. I understand the hardware variables, though, as I'd be pretty reluctant to give up usage of a nice portable player solely to support an improved codec. To be honest, though, that's just what I did: I bought a used MP3 CD Discman several months back, but I've barely used it because I prefer Vorbis. I'm a man of principle to a fault. Still, I hope Vorbis will continue gaining support.

I do think that in within 10 years, lossless will be the standard audio format. We'll have so much space and bandwidth that it simply won't matter. Lossy will be the "other choice." My opinion.